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Discover a revolutionary new forex robot.You must have read Part I of the Money Management Rules article. Failure in investing comes in two forms; Failure to maintain your principle and failure to effectively grow your principle. If you want to become a successful trader, than you need to learn how to grow your principle in the long term.Try Netpicks Forex Signal Service.
If you risk too much, you lose a large portion of your account. Risk more to try to recover the lost amount and lose all your account. There is another form of failure. You are able to grow your account 20% annually. On the surface, you may be a successful investor. But, if you had a good money management plan you could have made 40% annually. So was it a success or failure.
You should know before each trade how much is truly at risk in a single trade? Many traders misunderstand this and don’t know their risk. Suppose you have a $10,000 account and you buy one lot of EUR/USD. Your forex broker will set aside $1,000 in your account as a margin, so how much of your money is at risk? Many would say only $1000 but they are wrong. You have $9,000 to trade, $1000 was for margin. So your risk is $9,000 and you could lose up to this much before you receive a margin call from your broker.
A margin call is an order when your forex broker automatically takes you out of the trade once you have lost all but the last $1000. Once you get the margin call, it means you are out of the trade and have lost $9,000 in your trading. How could you lose $9,000 in a single trade?
Each pip on a EUR/USD contract will cost $10. So you need to lose 900 pips (900*10=9000) in order to lose $9,000. Many would say what about the stop loss. You are right! You don’t need to risk your whole account on a single trade and trade without a stop loss. You can use stop losses to protect your position in case the trade goes wrong. You could put a stop loss at 100 pips losing $1000 only. You could put a 50 pips stop loss losing only $500.
The amount of money that you set aside with your broker as margin does not tell you anything about the risk unless you plan to get a margin call no matter where you set the stop loss. Understanding these common money management pitfalls will help you a lot. Unless, you do not develop your own money management rules, you will most likely fall into one or more of these pitfalls.
Investors who enjoy the greatest amount of success in their trading are those who have clearly established money management rules that govern their trading. Those rules are; 1) Live to trade another day, 2) Knowing how much to risk and 3) Knowing how to determine the trade size. You should read Part III of this article where I explain these three rules in more detail.
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